Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (17 page)

In the sixteenth century the argument between the government and the capitalists was largely over ‘the damnable sin of usury’. Conservative opinion, holding that money was barren, was against all interest on loans. English churchmen, even Protestants, and especially those who cared about social reform, regretted that Calvin had made interest respectable. In 1543 Cranmer wrote to Osiander protesting against the economic immorality of the Reformation. Tudor government, from conservative suspicion, and from a desire to stop the oppression of the poor, agreed with Cranmer. In the cause of trade, interest was grudgingly allowed. A maximum rate of 10 per cent was set in 1545, withdrawn in 1552 and imposed once again in 1571 in an Act which nonetheless denounced usury as ‘forbidden by the laws of God’.

The regulations were not effective. The growth of trade led to an increase in financial dealings. Gresham, the realist, insisted that Englishmen who subscribed to government funds should be exempt from the Usury Acts; otherwise, as he well knew, no money would have been forthcoming. The government itself was forced to pay 14 per cent and more at Antwerp. The instinct of Tudor government was to regulate all aspects of national life, but the new money market was international in its scope and provisions and did not respond to the Tudors’ bluff attempts to intervene. Nonetheless the Tudors still tried. ‘How little’, wrote an official, giving the typical government opinion of merchants, ‘they regard the commonweal for advancement of their private lucre.’ Seeing the obvious excesses of the system, Tudor government continued to lay crude hands on the delicate mechanism of the capitalists. Private exchange business was suspended more than once.
An official Royal Exchanger was appointed whose hopeless task it was to try to steady and control the market. In 1576 some attempt was even made to nationalize exchange business.

Complete freedom from government control was the ideal of the capitalists, and while Parliament was stumbling over ineffective laws the merchants were loudly calling for the repeal of these laws entirely. And the capitalists had the most persuasive argument. ‘If we were not,’ they said, ‘the State could hardly stand. Where is money to be had in time of need if the city should fail?’ In particular, they objected that interest should be called usury and themselves made into criminals for demanding interest. When, in the late sixties, the political troubles of the Netherlands destroyed the Antwerp money market and the English government was forced to look for money at home, it at last saw the necessity to come to an agreement with merchants and speculators. Recognizing that capitalists were not saints and that they lived in an imperfect world, the Act of 1571 at last made the distinction between moderate interest, which the law would allow, and excessive interest which constituted usury. ‘It is’, said the Act, ‘biting and over sharp dealing which is disliked, and nothing else.’

This reluctant compromise was in fact the legal recognition of the capitalist practice which Gresham and his kind had already made quite usual in England. The Act of 1571 and the building of the Royal Exchange were equally part of Gresham’s triumph. To him, credit, interest and the like were problems of business, not of morals. None knew better than he the greed of speculators, but he thought that the market would control business where legislation could not. Instead of puzzling itself with moral considerations, the government was invited by Gresham to join the financiers for the common benefit of country and capitalist. With a rather bad grace, the government at last agreed.

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   The value of the mark was 13s. 4d.

6

Sir Francis Walsingham

O
BSCURE STEPS LED
from the feudal state to an autocratic monarchy. The final and successful acts in this progression were taken by Henry VII when he united a fractious land after the Wars of the Roses, and the particular colour that Henry gave to the English state lasted throughout the Tudor age. The Tudors are rightly called despots, and each reign bore the personal mark of the sovereign. But Henry VII was no political philosopher; he was a cautious, practical administrator who learnt his lessons from experience. During the English civil wars he had spent some time in France and the advantages of Louis’s centralized power had impressed him. The powerful French state was founded on nationalism and on the strong control that the king maintained over all parts of the national life, and when Henry came to the throne of England in 1485 he determined to govern his new land in the French manner. Ayala, the Spanish ambassador, noted Henry’s intention to rule ‘in the French fashion’, but added that he was not able to do so. What was possible in France was naturally not always practical in England; and perhaps this was to the good of the country. The actions of Henry VII were tyrannical enough, but Louis XI of France was a sterner scourge of his people. The lawyer Sir John Fortescue observed that Louis oppressed his subjects, levied arbitrary taxes, imprisoned without trial and executed secretly—all by virtue of the
jus regale
.

Even though English law and custom tried to check the arbitrary power of the sovereign, the Tudor monarchy began, in the French manner, to establish its absolute authority and to introduce some of the features of government that had worked so well in France. The first task of the Tudors was to subjugate the arrogant nobility and to diminish their feudal power which had caused such destruction in the civil wars. They went about this business with their usual blend of good sense, cunning and cruelty; within a century they had completely destroyed the power of the old
aristocratic families. Sir Walter Raleigh commented that an earl who might once have put a thousand horses into the field could now hardly raise twenty-five. Very astutely, the Tudors left the peers their privileges. The Garter was reserved for them; they retained their ceremonial functions at court; and certain prizes, such as lord lieutenancies, were for them alone. But political power was carefully kept from them and they were no longer the sovereign’s advisers. The Duke of Buckingham complained with some truth that the King would rather give offices and rewards to boys than to noblemen.

Ambitious lords were quickly cut down. Henry VIII executed Buckingham merely for having royal blood: the Tudors ferociously established their family dynasty and woe betide him or her who stood too close to the throne. Aristocrats who transgressed the law were severely dealt with, for the Tudors wisely used the law as the leveller of the people. In 1498 the Earl of Sheffield was outraged that he should be indicted for manslaughter before a common court, even though he was later pardoned by the King. Henry VIII insisted that Lord Dacres be tried for poaching; he was condemned and executed. Raleigh claimed that if the greatest lord should lift a finger, he would be locked up by the nearest constable. And Surrey at his trial accused the King of wishing to be rid of all the old nobility.

Having lost the favour of the monarchy, the aristocracy seemed to abandon the fight for political power. Depending on fixed incomes from land and subject to the gross inflation of the time, the lords could no longer support their old extravagance; and political ambition is usually expensive. The young Earl of Essex, one noble who dared to set himself against Elizabeth’s policy, right at the start of his career, in 1589, admitted to debts of about £23,000. The more their influence waned, the more conservative the nobles became. They refused to compete in the rude Tudor marketplace for preferment, but chose to retire with their pride and idiosyncrasy to their dogs and hawks. Dudley, the hated minister of Henry VII, accused the aristocrats of neglecting the education of their sons so that ‘the children of poor men and mean folk are promoted to the promotion and authority that the children of noble blood should have’. Latimer deplored the ignorance of the upper ranks of society, and Ascham, Elizabeth’s tutor, roundly blamed the nobles for their own eclipse. ‘The fault is in yourselves,
ye noblemen’s sons,’ he wrote in his
Scholemaster
, ‘and therefore ye deserve the greater blame that commonly the meaner men’s children come to be the wisest counsellors and greatest doers in the weighty affairs of this realm.’ These commentators were deceived by the conventional ideals of Tudor society, and by its love of order. They expected the lord to have an influence commensurate with his exalted rank. But the Tudors, deliberately and subtly, had cut away the power and left the prestige of the lord. In their sulky way, the nobility recognized this and retired from the contests of the public stage.

‘The wanton bringing up and ignorance of the nobility’, wrote a Tudor official, ‘force the prince to advance new men that can serve.’ The instinct of the French monarchy had been to employ men of low birth who repaid the king’s favour with an unquestioning loyalty. A visitor to the court of Louis XI had the impression that the King’s closest advisers were his barber and his doctor. Henry VII, copying France in this as in much else, also had humble men as his great officers. Even Perkin Warbeck denounced the ‘caitiffs and villains of simple birth’ in Henry’s administration. And Henry VIII followed the example of his father. One of the pleas of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 was that Thomas Cromwell should be removed from the Privy Council because of his villain blood. Wolsey was the son of an Ipswich butcher, and his enemies never let him forget it. Dukes and barons, however great they were, wrote William Roy:

But they are entertained to crouch

Before this butcherly flouch.

And another poet, the impetuous John Skelton, spoke contemptuously of Wolsey’s ‘greasy genealogy’:

He came to the sang royal

That was cast out of a butcher’s stall.

But the poor and the humble were generally uneducated, and though the exceptional man might rise by the royal favour, the monarchy could not rely on the lower classes to provide the large number of officials and administrators that the new centralized organization of the State required. The gentry now came enthusiastically forward to fill the gap in the royal service, and began the startling rise that was to make them the dominant group in
English society. The members of this class were hard to define but easy to recognize. Despite the Tudor love for order and strict social hierarchy, the middle ranks of society were in a constant state of flux, and there was plenty of movement both up and down. In general the gentry occupied the middle ground between the yeomen and the aristocracy, ‘neither in the lowest grounds … nor in the highest mountains’, as Raleigh put it, ‘but in the valleys between both’. The members of this class were mainly small landowners, but rich yeomen, farmers and merchants belonged as well, and the class also included the professional men, lawyers, doctors and divines. The distinguishing mark of the class was prosperity, for the common opinion was that ‘gentility is nothing but ancient riches’; speaking on behalf of the class to which he belonged Sir Thomas Smith claimed, with a cynical realism, that a gentleman is he who spends his money like a gentleman.

These men were confident, ambitious and ready for public service. Very many of them were enriched by the expansion of trade in the sixteenth century and sought the places and honours that the crown could grant to go with their new wealth. Others were the restless younger sons of landed families, forced to make their own way in the world by the English system of inheritance which refused to split up estates between the children, gave all to the eldest son and no land to the younger. Others benefited from the increase of civic business. The lawyers especially did very well; the economic writer Thomas Wilson stated that the leading Elizabethan lawyers were making over £20,000 a year. All the spoils of society seemed to come the way of the rising gentry. They benefited from trade and from enclosures; they bought or mortgaged the lands of the old nobles, reduced by extravagance and conservatism to live like ‘rich beggars, always in want’; they bought the crown lands sold off by the monarchy to cover its debts. By the end of the sixteenth century the aggregate income of the gentry was three times that of the peers, clergy and yeomen added together. In their new success it is no surprise that they began to look for political advancement.

And in this, too, circumstances were right for them. The Tudors would not employ the aristocracy, yet needed men of education. The educated gentry were no threat to the throne, for rebellion was hardly likely to form around men whose names were unknown beyond their village or county. In the past many officials had
been churchmen; with the Reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries and the formation of the secular State, churchmen were no longer available, and their places were taken by the gentry. For the young man of good, but not high, birth, reasonable ambition and some talent, political service was the best career open to him.

Francis Walsingham wes a member of this bold class. He was born about 1536 into a family, descendants of a London shoemaker, which had slowly progressed up the ranks of the gild hierarchy and had come finally to a country house in Kent. His father was a London barrister, his mother a member of the very Protestant Denny family; his step-father, the man who brought him up, was the brother-in-law of Anne Boleyn’s sister. His inheritance was Protestant and prosperous; members of his family had attended at court and knew something of the perils and rewards of the King’s service. Francis was given the education suitable to a gentleman, and went in time to King’s College, Cambridge, where his Protestantism was greatly strengthened by the enthusiastic Reformers of that university. At an early age Walsingham was a Puritan, even something of a fanatic, and he retained his strong religion until his death. In the way then customary for the wealthy student, he travelled abroad after his degree. Soon after his return to England the Catholic Mary came to the throne and Walsingham, the Puritan, found it wise quickly to bend his steps to the continent once more.